Category Archives: action figures

Yes, Mickey couldn’t help it. The toys hit the shelves in Walmart. He discovered the silly superhero junior highschool romance thing first on Pinterest, then on YouTube. Miraculous, the Adventures of Ladybug and Cat Noir. The silly thing is on Netflix now too.

So, why would a goofy old man like me be interested in a thing like this… a thing aimed at an audience of pre-teen girls? That’s disturbingly creepy, isn’t it?

Well, I never claimed to be cool. I was an English teacher for 31 years. Cool was never an option.

And I collect dolls… erm… action figures… uh… well, I might as well be honest. I have more Barbies than G.I. Joes. I have a hoarding disorder fixated on 12-inch dolls. And when I saw this doll for less than 15 dollars at Walmart, I had to buy it. And it has the other super hero, Cat Noir right beside it. Both under 20 dollars so they fit under the 20 dollar limit. And both together only cost 30 dollars, so it fits under the 50 dollar per month limit as well. Those collecting rules are important in saving me from my own juvenile regressive self and helps me have enough money to buy food all month long.

The people in the store don’t look at me funny. I am not the only old man buying toys and dolls in Walmart. I am just the only old man there not buying for his grandkids. I don’t have any grandkids yet, and my own kids are definitely older than the toy-wanting stage. The people would be far more disturbed if they knew I was now struggling with the question, “Do I preserve these dolls mint-in-box? Or do I take them out and play with them?” And if you have read any of my lunatic “he-plays-with-dolls” posts, you probably already know how that one will turn out.

People might also be deeply disturbed to know that I have already watched two episodes of Miraculous, and (shudder) liked them in spite of the moronic romance and love-triangle bull poop. I can’t promise that I will not watch more and turn away from this new filthy habit. The stories are stupid villain-of-the-week stuff. But the CGI animation is brightly colored, smooth, and highly interesting… to the point that I and any available chimpanzees or monkeys will be enthralled with it. Oh, and pre-teen girls too. I won’t go into the connections between those things.

I could probably spend a lot of words telling you more about how this cartoon is set in Paris, France, and how Marinette and Adrien, the secret identities of the two superheroes above, are both in love with each other, but don’t realize it because neither one knows the secret identity of the other. But I won’t. This post is not a review of the cartoon show. This post is a goofy commentary celebrating the fact that I bought myself two more dolls, and now must somehow rationalize that weird, compulsive act.

You know that old doll house that my wife rescued for me? You don’t? Well, about six or seven years ago she spotted it on the sidewalk with a pile of other trash waiting for the city garbage collectors. She asked the homeowner about it. It was a kit they had bought at Michael’s but never finished, so my wife immediately thought, “My goofy old husband collects dolls all the time, so he will love this.”

“Take it,” said the homeowner, “It’s a shame to have to throw it out.”

So she brought it home and gave it to me. I of course, collect twelve inch dolls and action figures, none of which fit in a doll house of this particular scale. So it had to sit practically empty for a space of about four years. Then my daughter got tired of some of the small Happy Meal dolls that she had gotten from McDonald’s when she was a wee gamin. (Yes, that’s a real thing… you can look it up.) I acquired two mostly naked Mini-Barbies, and four other doll-house size dolls, two baseball players and a Lullaby League Girl from Oz, along with a small Winkie Soldier. Then Dreamworks did the Trolls movie.

They began moving in by two different routes, these trolls. Teacher Troll and Baby Troll and Big Troll, whose hair in the back is the only visible part of him… or possibly her, moved in from where I found them in kids’ bedrooms and the garage while cleaning. I used to keep a stash of them to give out as classroom prizes back in the 90’s. I bought the movie Trolls from Walmart at $5 a shot over a bunch of weeks between Thanksgiving and last weekend. The empty spaces where I didn’t even have appropriate doll furniture were now being filled by Trolls.

In the downstairs bedroom you can see the little yellow Troll has joined Naked Mini-Barbie, the Lullaby-Leaguer, Ceramic Book-Lovin’ Bear and the Angel who used to hold my wedding ring. (I could never wear it due to arthritis, and it eventually got lost in the move from South Texas to Dallas.) (Yes, I know it is not a good thing to lose your wedding ring, but it is possible my wife sold it so she could shop for a better husband. At least, that’s what she told me while she was really angry.) (And yes, I know I’m supposed to be talking about Trolls taking over my doll house, but I actually like bird-walking while telling such stories. It lends such every-day Mickey-ness to the story.)

The baseball player in the upstairs sitting room where nobody sits, once spent an entire winter at the bottom of the swimming pool. That’s why his blue uniform turned a bit putrid green. He stays in this room with my Wish-nik Troll from 1967 and the Winkie Soldier from Oz, who is naturally green in the face and never took a swim.

Also upstairs are my Troll-topped Pez dispensers, two more movie Trolls, and the former Teacher Troll who lost her apple and my daughter gave a modelling clay diaper to for modesty’s sake which has long since melted a bit (the diaper, not the modesty).

And at the top of it all, in the attic, are the two movie Trolls that I bought first and started this whole Troll-collection nonsense. So now the doll house is no longer empty. But the Trolls are beginning to complain that there is no paint on the walls, and I really ought to do something about that before they take matters into their own hands. You never know what they might do in the middle of the night when nobody is looking.

I suppose it is a rather girly thing… or maybe even a creepy thing, that a sixty year old man like me collects and plays with dolls. This post, a lazy-writer short post, is intended just to show you some of my newest dolls and newest collections. I am not going to waste time justifying why I like dolls. That would probably require an advanced degree in abnormal psychology. So I will just show you and gloat about what I have achieved in my own weird little way.

This Monster High doll is Frankie Stein, the daughter of Frankenstein’s monster. I scored two of these at Walmart’s pre-Christmas clearance sale for three dollars apiece. This is the one I pose and play with. The other I am keeping as a mint in box.

These are the three lovely girls I bought with Christmas money from relatives back in Iowa. I went almost to the limit buying Starfire at a pricey $19.88. The collection rules clearly state, “Never buy a single doll worth more than $20.”

I bought Starfire to keep Harley Quinn, my other $19.88 doll company as part of my DC Heroines collection. That collection as it now stands follows.

You can see I still need Batgirl and Poison Ivy.

So there is my lazy-writer post about me playing with dolls, poorly rationalized and barely explained.

The vile Greek God of computer malfunctions, Sparkensputter Failtolodicuss, put his curse on this post yesterday as I almost had it completed. He waved his dead skunk, the symbol of his unique power, and made WordPress delete my work and instantly save the changes. I did some cussing and vowed to try and reassemble the post today. It was intended to be a continuation of Action Figure Cartoons, starring Captain Action. We shall see if Sparkensputter manages to thwart me again today. He is hell at thwarting.

So here is a brief and goofy explanation of what has happened so far. Captain Carl Action and the Action Guy Action Team defeated the evil Dr. Evil as he tried to take over Mickey’s library. You can find that whole mess in Mickey’s vault by clicking here.

Captain Carl Action not only defeated the evil Dr. Evil, he removed and stole Dr. Evil’s evil removable brain. So Emperor Ming of Mongo, an evil incarnation of the evil Dr. Evil, came up with a plan to retrieve the brain by un-boxing one of Mickey’s mint-in-box bargain bin dolls… er, action figures. You can review that whole mess here.

So, that brings us to today’s episode in the seemingly endless story of the sequel of a seemingly endless story.

Captain Carl Action has taken the evil brain of the evil Dr. Evil to the Action Guy Action Team Headquarters in the Fortress of Ineptitude, located on top of a useless computer in Mickey’s studio.

As seen in this dramatic scene, you can probably tell that the Action Guy Action Team Headquarters is run by the Captain Action Council, made up of Captain Action in his Flash Gordon costume, the mint-in-box Captain Victor Action, and the vintage Captain Action in his Steve Canyon costume. You can also probably tell by Steve Canyon’s goofy brain-eating bug comment that none of them are any brighter than Captain Carl Action. They have all decided to rely on the dolls of Mickey’s big-headed dolls collection. That decision also reeks of lack of brightness.

Captain Carl Action has once again delegated primary responsibility for the situation to a group of dolls who are very good at guarding Crackerjacks. It was fortunate that DC Comics recently released a new set of DC Super Hero Girls to attract Mickey’s collecting OCD. It meant that big-headed Supergirl was available now to be an actual super-powered guardian. Still, she had to find a strategy that would succeed. So she turned to her crackerjack team for advice.

Now, I hate to second-guess Supergirl, but why is she asking an evil bunny for advice? And how did an evil bunny even get on to a gig like being part of the big-headed dolls’ crackerjack team?

Shelf of Severed Heads?!!!? That doesn’t sound right.

Oh, my! This is really not looking good for our heroes. Stay tuned until next time… whenever the heck that is… same batty time, same batty channel. And phooey on you, Sparkensputter Failtolodicuss!

Sometimes, when you have been writing up a storm, you have to linger for a moment and rest in the storm’s eye. That’s what today’s post is. It includes a goofy metaphor that is basically all wet. It has a picture of my hoarding disorder collection of Monster High dolls… and some of my countless videos… I’m a movie collector and hoarder too. And there is not a lot of research or hard new thinking in this post. It is basically a random warble to fill a daily post, since I have posted every day now for a year and nine months. At 60 and in poor health, I probably don’t have a lot of time left to get the words out. But I have a lot of words still inside me. You may have to put up with a few days of babbling here and there. But I promise, the babbling will be quirky and excessively goofy, so it won’t be totally boring. Running in place doesn’t get you anywhere, but it is still good exercise.

One of the biggest problems with being an action figure aficionado with raging hoarding disorder is the fact that every new dolly has it’s own personality… and sometimes its own evil agenda. Once you own too many of these things, especially the evil ones, it is no longer possible to properly pay attention to what they are up to.

The last installment of Action Figure Comics had the hero, Captain Action (specifically Captain Carl Action) thwarting the evil Doctor Evil by taking away his evil removable brain. (I know I use the word evil far too often in describing the evil Doctor Evil, but he is also repetitively redundant.) I had thought this Achilles’ heel of Dr. Evil’s… er, rather, this Achilles’ brain of the evil Doctor Evil was just too convenient a solution to the problem presented by this irrepressible evil bad guy. But as a rule I find ignorance is bliss. I know now that I was wrong. That was a terrible rule to follow. As a former teacher you are supposed to know that ignorance is not bliss… it is evil. After 31 years of fighting the War Against Ignorance in my classroom, you would think I would remember this. I should’ve been watching Emperor Ming of Mongo more closely… or should that be closlier? Battle scars from the War have left me unsure.

One has to recall that Evil Emperor Ming is really just another incarnation of the evil Doctor Evil under his mask… although not one with a removable brain. Notice that his minion, the evil Doctor Mindbender is no less evil when it comes to redundant use of the word “evil”… and he even commits the further sin of repetitively saying “no-good goody-goody”. “Ach! Ja! Evil use of bad grammar makes my battle scars hurt more!” cries the former teacher driven to write this hopeless drivel.

What’s this? He means to destroy the new bargain bin wrestler doll… I mean, action figure that I just bought? I had meant to keep that as a mint in box collector’s item until the lucha wrestling fans of Sin Cara are as old as I am now. Then I will find one of them with hoarding disorder and sell it for possibly eight dollars. I will have made a whole dollar by the time I’m 109!

Yes, I should’ve been watching that dang evil Emperor Ming more closely! Now he has ruined my mint-in-box action figure by taking it out of the box. What bad thing will he do next? Stay tuned to this goofy old blog. You never know, I may actually continue this story if I can keep better track of what these goofy little dolls are doing.

I have always been a deeply devoted fan of the Sunday funnies. And one of the reasons I read the comics religiously was the work of Milt Caniff. His comic strips, Terry and the Pirates, Male Call, and Steve Canyon set a standard for the age of action comics and adventure strips.

I read his comics in the 1960’s and 1970’s and always it was Steve Canyon. But this, of course, was not his first strip. I would discover in my college years the wonders of Terry and the Pirates. When Caniff started the strip before World War II, he set it in China, but actually knew nothing about China. So he did research. He learned about people who became oriental hereditary pirate families and organizations. He learned to draw authentic Chinese settings. His comedy relief characters, Connie and the Big Stoop, were rather racist parodies of Chinamen and were among the reasons that the original strip had to mature into his later work in Steve Canyon. But perhaps the most enduring character from the strip was the mysterious pirate leader known as the Dragon Lady.

Steve Canyon is a fascinating study in the comic arts. When he left the Terry and the Pirates strip in 1946, it went on without him. It was owned by the Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News distribution syndicate, not Caniff himself. Steve Canyon would change that. He created it and owned it himself, making Caniff one of only two or three comics artists who actually owned their own creations. Canyon started out as a civilian pilot, but enlisted in the Air Force for the Korean War and would remain in the Air Force for the remainder of the strip. Some of the characters in the strip were based on real people. His long-time friend Charlie Russhon, a former photographer and Lieutenant in the Air Force who went on to be a technical adviser for James Bond films was the model for the character Charlie Vanilla, the man with the ice cream cone. Madame Lynx was based on the femme fatale spy character played by Illona Massey in the 1949 Marx Brothers’ movie Love Happy. Caniff designed Pipper the Piper after John Kennedy and Miss Mizzou after Marilyn Monroe.

I am not the only cartoonist who was taken with the work of Milt Caniff. The effects of his ground-breaking work can be seen to influence the works of comic artists like Jack Kirby, Bob Kane, John Romita Sr., and Doug Wildey. If you are anything like the comic book nut I am, than you are impressed by that list, even more so if I listed everyone he influenced. Milt Caniff was a cartoonists’ cartoonist. He was one of the founders of the National Cartoonists’ Society and served two terms as its president in 1948 and 1949. He is also a member of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.